Technical Post - Aspen Character Design (Patreon)

Hello everyone, it's adi! Thank you, as always, for all your support all of the time! I wanted to go a little in-depth about the design process for Aspen, one of the heroines in Please Be Happy, since we haven't shed a ton of light on the development of the game yet.

Way, way back when the project started, before PBH was called PBH, the game was originally just a single love interest game, and that was Aspen -

no, it was Miho. Aspen was the protagonist.

There's been a ton of changes!

We had a couple ideas for what we wanted for Aspen, but we really weren't entirely sure. I did a couple doodles here and there too before we settled on our current artist.

Soon after, minute told us about one of her favourite artists - kobuta! kobuta did a lot of Flowers fanart so we thought the genre would fit well. Their art is absolutely beautiful, so we reached out to them! There was a lot of Google translate involved, and a moment where a miscommunication led to kobuta turning us down. (That was terrifying!!!) It all worked out in the end though. Thank you for being patient with us, kobuta...

For character design, we send a document of information -

For Aspen, we paid a translator to translate this document for accuracy. We also include lots of photos - particularly for hair style and fashion. We also initially wrote up a lot of her character and background, but we figured it wasn't necessary later on and wrote shorter personality statements.

A couple weeks later, kobuta sent us this! Something that's happened consistently with working with them is that kobuta knows what we want better than we do - Aspen was totally different from what we expected, but we loved her immediately as soon as we saw her design! We went with D, with a couple of adjustments - her hat is lightened up and… that's mostly it.

We got a barista outfit design from kobuta, since Miho will meet Aspen a lot where she works, too! I love the ¾ sleeve blouse for Aspen a lot.

kobuta's working on the last pieces of art for PBH now - and one of them includes another outfit for Aspen! I'm very excited to see how it turns out, and maybe I'll be able to share that with you soon.

I hope you enjoyed this little journey into the development of PBH! If you enjoyed it, let me know and I'll continue this little series for the rest of the main characters of the world!

-adi